My Only Gripe/Fear/Current Feedback for ArmA 3 at this time: Multiplayer Stability

[Herrick 1]

I love Arma 3 so far from what I've played of it. I've had one hell of a blast running some missions with friends and even doing some of my own in the editor since the alpha launched. I've noticed as a whole, stability and performance seems to have jumped quite a bit for me since Arma 2, which had me thoroughly impressed. As of this point in time, I can run Arma 3 as well as, if not a little better than, Arma 2 which makes me incredibly happy.

However, the biggest issue I've noticed, and has continued to be a huge issue for the Arma series since Arma 1: Multiplayer Stability. What I mean by this is, my performance jump is way to significant from switching over from single player to multiplayer. In most modern games these days, there is no stability drop, or performance drop... but in this case, its not even the desync or lacking netcode that has me concerned. Its the drop of the actual rendering performance when making the switch. I will go in a single player game to running everything on standard to high settings and be fine with a general frame rate of 40-50 FPS, but as soon as I switch over to multiplayer, that framerate drops, with all settings on the lowest, disabling shadows, etc. etc. to anywhere from 10-30 FPS. I know that the way the visual scaling works is funky as is, because different settings go to the CPU and GPU depending on what you switch them to. Anyway to optimize the multiplayer performance in any big way would be greatly appreciated. Good netcode, and lack of desynchronization would be fantastic!... but right now, I think fixing the actual performance issues are more important. Very difficult playing with my friends when I'm running a slideshow. With that being said, I understand its an alpha and all that, just wanted to provide some feedback.

Also: It would be great if you guys tweak the options menu to show what settings go over to the CPU and what settings go over to the GPU... like a little asterisk or icon or hover tip would be great. It'll help give a better idea of how to best optimize the performance for one's PC.

[joebopie 1]

I agree I would be nice to quickly see weather the settings are handled by the CPU or the GPU as people would more easily see what is holding their system back. of Corse with the alpha things will change and improve over time. the problem is your pc has to do a lot and through only a couple of cores. and with no server.exe its not easy for you average person to set up a separate box to host things on. for arma 2 to I use my old pc as a server so that I can use my fibre optic bandwidth without like you say turning my game into a slide show. sadly without BE anyway hosting public at the moment is suicide for a server, it Will be hacked at some point sadly.

as the game is not to well optimised for now a server.exe would allow some of us to host more stable private server as i was in a 8 man tvt in my clan and the 4.8GHZ 6 core amd was only allowing the host to play at 12 FPS. if the host wasn't a player this problem would be solved (sort of).

o yea arma is SOOO CPU heavy and wont use all cores GHZ are the name of the game, if your CPU isn't keeping up the GPU isn't going to do much.

[Colt45_GTO 10]

i knew my pc would struggle with it, its got old and decrepid with it being DDR2 system. but it does still run A3 better than A2. be nice to run at full whack one day. once i get a new pc :)

i should go play some more but too busy at the mo :(

[Vibe 1]

Yeah, I'm also getting huge performance hits when playing multiplayer. Singleplayer is very smooth though.

[killa-conni 10]

I agree with OP 100%. Nice Alpha, if the MP performance will improve this game will be THE shit.

[guusert 1]

People, don't say: I'll have to buy a new processor.

It's Bohemia's fault. They have to deal with this. The recommended processors are: Intel Dual-Core 2.4 GHz or AMD Dual-Core Athlon 2.5 GHz

You should at least be able to run the game on High settings at 30 FPS when it is released. If you can't, you should just ask for a refund.

Edited March 19, 2013 by guusert

[chortles 263]

Please remember that without dedicated server binaries, you may be running on the equivalent of console-style matchmaking :eek: Horror of horrors, I know, but it may well be that you're playing a "server" that's really just the host's own gaming computer even if it's not suited to act as a server, and that presumably is at least part of the reason for stability problems.

[VaZe159 1]

I honestly have not experienced much of a hit at all from single player and multiplayer differences. The only problem I have ever ran into when playing on a server is a laggy server. Other than that I can play everything on ultra at around 40-60 fps. It only drops down to maybe 35 if their are heavy explosions on very detailed terrain. But I am running a GTX 670 with an i7 3770k oc'd at 4.5GHZ and running on 8 threads. Also 16GBs of ram so I have plenty of memory. I have seen that some people have systems like mine but have ran into the same issues here but I do not see how. I also have my operating system on my SSD and everything else on my seagate so I am sure that helps tremendously seeing that the system is on a completely different drive then what the game is being run on so there is no confliction between the operating system and the game trying to be run from one drive.

[simjedi 10]

Please remember that without dedicated server binaries, you may be running on the equivalent of console-style matchmaking :eek: Horror of horrors, I know, but it may well be that you're playing a "server" that's really just the host's own gaming computer even if it's not suited to act as a server, and that presumably is at least part of the reason for stability problems.

This. MP is just a added bonus. The phase we are in right now is just testing the core mechanics of the game. MP testing will come later on down the road when official server files are released. People seem to think we are in the final release of the game, we are not. But since the Alpha release grants us much freedom it can seem misleading. MP should not be focused on at this moment IMO.

[galzohar 31]

The problem is not the overall FPS, but rather the random freezes that happen way too often for no apparent reason.

[wooly-back-jack 10]

^^ I've had a few of those freezes, like staring at a screenshot then when you ctrl-alt-del the box pops up 'Arma3 has stopped working' but hey ho, we are alpha testers...I wish people would stop moaning as if we are playing the finished product. You will have the finished product one day, after alpha and beta testing, you got it for £20 ffs, what is the problem?

[ratszo 17]

I freeze on hi-pop servers alot..., much less tho, if i get a low ping.

So, i'm thinking it's a server-side, netcode problem, since my temps are good.

Waiting for server.exe support. Bis will get the netcode stable.